rethinking urban parks public space and cultural diversity

Rethinking urban parks : public space and cultural diversity / Setha Low, Dana Taplin, and Suzanne Scheld.. List of Illustrations viiChapter 1 The Cultural Life of Large Urban Spaces 1

Photography credits: Photographs 4.2 and 4.3 are by Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani Photographs 2.1,

3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, 6.5, 8.1, and drawing 3.4 are by Dana Taplin

Photographs 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 4.1, and 4.4 are by Setha Low

Copyright © 2005 by the University of Texas Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

䊊 ⬁ The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI /NISO Z39.48-1992

(R1997) (Permanence of Paper).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Low, Setha M.

Rethinking urban parks : public space and cultural diversity / Setha Low, Dana Taplin, and

Suzanne Scheld — 1st ed.

p cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-292-70685-5 (cloth : alk paper) —ISBN 0-292-71254-5 (pbk : alk paper) 1 Public

spaces —United States 2 Urban parks —United States 3 Environmental psychology —United

States 4 Multiculturalism —United States I Taplin, Dana II Scheld, Suzanne III Title.

HT153.L68 2005

307.76 — dc22

2005014161

List of Illustrations vii

Chapter 1 The Cultural Life of Large Urban Spaces 1

Chapter 2 Urban Parks

Chapter 3 Prospect Park

Chapter 4 The Ellis Island Bridge Proposal

Chapter 5 Jacob Riis Park

Chapter 6 Orchard Beach in Pelham Bay Park

Chapter 7 Independence National Historical Park

Chapter 8 Anthropological Methods for Assessing Cultural Values 175

Chapter 9 Conclusion

3.1 Park-Related User Values in

Prospect Park 51

3.2 Park Values in Prospect Park

User Study Reclassifi ed 52

3.3 Values and Census Group in

Prospect Park User Study 53

4.1 Ellis Island Bridge Constituency

Groups 72

4.2 Ellis Island: Methods, Data,

Duration, Products, and What

4.6 Value Orientations:

Compari-son across Parks and

Neighbor-hoods 98

5.1 Jacob Riis Park: Methods, Data,

Duration, Products, and What

Can Be Learned 107

7.1 Independence National

Historical Park: Methods, Data,

Duration, Products, and What

Can Be Learned 154

7.2 Independence National

Histori-cal Park: Comparison of Cultural

Groups by Content Analysis

Categories 171

8.1 Qualitative Methodologies in Cultural Anthropology: Research Appropriateness 180

8.2 Constituency Analysis 1818.3 Overview of Methods, Data, Products, and What Can Be Learned 192

Maps

3.1 Prospect Park 444.1 Liberty State Park and Proposed Bridge 70

5.1 Jacob Riis Park 1066.1 Pelham Bay Park 1287.1 Cultural Resources For African Americans 157

7.2 Cultural Resources For Asian Americans 161

7.3 Cultural Resources For Hispanic Americans 163

7.4 Cultural Resources For Italian Americans 166

7.5 Cultural Resources For Jewish Americans 168

Photos and Drawings

1.1 Shoeshine men in Parque Central

in San José, Costa Rica 61.2 Pensioners in Parque Central in San José, Costa Rica 61.3 Vendors and religious practition-ers in Parque Central 71.4 Redesigned Parque Central 7

List of Illustrations

2.1 Romantic detail— Cleftridge

Span in Prospect Park 213.1 The Long Meadow in Prospect

Park 463.2 Sunbathers at Prospect

Park 493.3 Winter day, Prospect Park 49

3.4 The drummers’ grove in Prospect

Park 564.1 Circle Line ferry from Battery

Park to Ellis Island 754.2 Battery Park landscape with

Castle Clinton in the ground 76

back-4.3 Caricatures for sale, Battery

Park 764.4 A meadow in the northern sector

of Liberty State Park 84

5.1 Jacob Riis Park bathhouse, enade, and beach 105

prom-5.2 Picnickers at Jacob Riis Park 113

5.3 The Clock at Jacob Riis Park 113

5.4 Park visitor cooking in shade cast

by concrete wall, Riis Park 1186.1 Promenade at Orchard

Beach 1296.2 Pelham Bay from the Orchard Beach Promenade 1356.3 Concessions area at Orchard Beach 135

6.4 Picnicking at Orchard Beach 139

6.5 Seniors at Orchard Beach 1418.1 Ethnographers at work at Jacob Riis Park 176

During the fi rst round of copyediting of this manuscript we tried to

regu-larize the terminology used to refer to groups of people when described

by ethnicity, race, and class We were acutely aware that these categories are socially constructed — that is imagined, created, negotiated, and used —by

people with regard to particular places, times, and circumstances, and that all

labels can lead to stereotyping and essentializing of what are slippery and

con-stantly transforming social identities We also were concerned with how racial

terms have become historically merged with notions of ethnicity and class, and

how racial categories are used to justify discriminatory activities Nonetheless,

our topic was cultural diversity, and to make many of our points —which we

believe to be empowering —we needed to write about people as culturally and

politically relevant groups rather than as individuals, and with terminology that

our interviewees and community co-workers would recognize and use to

rep-resent themselves

Equally problematic is that each chapter is based on research conducted at

different historical moments when ethnic /racial terms were shifting both within

the study population (from Hispanic to Latino and from black to African

American) and within the academy (from black to Afro-Caribbean American

or African American) We also had problems with an unmarked “white”

cat-egory, frequently used in park studies in which only the marked social category

of “others” is discussed In New York City and the Northeastern region, “white”

covers many distinct ethnic and cultural groups that have very little

resem-blance to one another in terms of history, class status, language, and residence

For example, recently arrived Russians who use Jacob Riis Park are socially and

culturally distinct from long-time Brooklyn residents in terms of their beach

use and interests As another example, we found that fourth-generation Italian

Americans at Independence identifi ed so strongly with their language and

cul-ture that they did not see the Independence Historical National Park

interpre-tation as related to their cultural group any more than did the Puerto Rican

Americans we interviewed

In view of all these problems, we are unable to provide any fi xed

terminol-ogy or categories for referring to or identifying the different cultural, racial,

A Note on Terminology

ethnic, and class groups we discuss in this book Instead, we relied on the

cat-egories used by the groups themselves, or employed the catcat-egories that the park

managers and administrators gave us when beginning a project Therefore, the

terminology varies from chapter to chapter, and in some cases varies within

a chapter if there are differences between the terms individuals use to refer to

themselves and the categories that were mandated for the specifi c park project

Readers should not have a problem with these variations because, every day, we

encounter the decision of whether to use black or African American, Latino or

Puerto Rican, white or Jewish

We hope that readers will consider the richness of this ever-changing

ter-minology as both creative, part of the identity-making and affi rming of

indi-viduals, and also destructive, in that it refl ects the distinctions and dualities of

black /white, white /people of color, and native /immigrant that pervade our

language and can lead to discrimination in U.S society Although we do not

focus directly on racism in the United States, racist ideology and practices

un-derlie the cultural processes and forms of exclusion we describe in urban parks

and beaches We intend this work to be antiracist at its core, and to

contrib-ute to a better understanding of how racism, as a system of racial advantage /

disadvantage, configures everyday park use and management

The authors would like to thank the National Park Service (NPS) and

espe-cially Doris Fanelli and Martha Aikens at Independence National ical Park, Richard Wells at Ellis Island, William Garrett at Jacob Riis Park, the late Muriel Crespi, Ph.D., past director of the NPS Applied Anthropology

Histor-Program located in Washington, D.C., and Rebecca Joseph, Ph.D., and Chuck

Smyth e, Ph.D., the East Coast regional directors of the ethnography program,

for their support of this project We would also like to thank the New York

City Department of Parks and Recreation and the managers of Pelham Bay,

Van Cortlandt and Prospect Parks —Linda Dockery, Mary Ann Anderson, and

Tupper Thomas — for funding of the research reported for New York City

Setha Low would also like to thank the staff at the Getty Conservation

Insti-tute (GCI) at the Getty Center in Los Angeles — Sheri Saperstein, Valerie

Great-house, David Myers, Kris Kelly, and Eric Bruehl— for making the writing of

this book possible A guest scholar fellowship at the GCI from January through

March of 2003 enabled her to complete the fi rst draft of this manuscript We

would also like to thank the Graduate Center of the City University of New York

and particularly the Center for Human Environments and its director, Susan

Saegert, for their support and assistance Without Susan’s encouragement and

her staff ’s help, these research projects would have been much more diffi cult

Some of the material in this book draws upon material published in the

fol-lowing articles:

Low, Setha 2004 Social Sustainability: People, History, Values In Managing

Change: Sustainable Approaches to the Conservation of the Built ment, ed J Teutonico Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute.

Environ-Low, Setha 2002 Anthropological-Ethnographic Methods for the Assessment

of Cultural Values in Heritage Conservation In Assessing the Values of Cultural Heritage, ed Marta de la Torre, 31–50 Los Angeles: the Getty

Conservation Institute

Low, Setha M., Dana Taplin, Suzanne Scheld, and Tracy Fisher 2001

Recaptur-ing Erased Histories: Ethnicity, Design, and Cultural Representation: A

Case Study of Independence National Historical Park Journal of tectural and Planning Research 18 (2): 131–148.

Archi-Taplin, Dana H., Suzanne Scheld, and Setha Low 2002 Rapid Ethnographic

Assessment in Urban Parks: A Case Study of Independence National

His-torical Park Human Organization 61 (1): 80 – 93.

Taplin, Dana H 2003 Sustainability in Urban Parks —Narrow and Broad

Proceedings: Urban Ecology: Cities in Transition New York: Pace

Univer-sity Institute for Environmental and Regional Studies, 65 –76

Writing a book always requires aid from colleagues and friends as well A

long list of graduate students at the CUNY Graduate Center collected the data

for these projects, including Charles Price-Reavis, Bea Vidacs, Marilyn

Diggs-Thompson, Ana Aparicio, Raymond Codrington, Carlotta Pasquali, Carmen

Vidal, and Nancy Schwartz Kate Brower, the director of the Van Cortlandt

Park project, decided not to participate in the writing of this book, but we are

indebted to her for her insights and guidance Larissa Honey and Tracy Fisher

also worked on these research projects before moving on, but their work was

important to our completing the projects Comments from Matthew Cooper,

the late Robert Hanna, and the seminar members at the Getty Conservation

Institute — especially Randy Mason and Marta de la Torre —were particularly

helpful We would also like to thank Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Benita

How-ell, William Kornblum, Galen Cranz, and Randy Hester for their many

publica-tions and research in this important area, and for their helpful comments

We want to acknowledge Muriel Crespi, Ph.D., director of the NPS

Ap-plied Anthropology Program, for supporting this important work and Robert

Hanna, a landscape architect who loved these parks Both Miki and Bob died

during the writing of this book, so they were never able to see the fi nal results

of their encouragement We hope that this book will keep alive their vision of

culturally vibrant and protected parks

We are grateful that we had such excellent assistance from UT Press,

espe-cially from Editor-in-Chief Theresa May, manuscript editor Lynne Chapman,

and designer Lisa Tremaine On the CUNY side, we are grateful to Jared Becker

of C.H.E

And fi nally, we would like to dedicate this book to our respective partners —

Joel Lefkowitz, Michele Greenberg, and Isma Diaw — in gratitude for their love

and support throughout the research and writing process It has been a long

journey, and they have been incredibly helpful— from lending cars and taking

photographs to cooking dinners — so that this book could be fi nished Thank

you to all who contributed to our work

Rethinking Urban Parks

The Cultural Life of Large Urban Spaces

Introduction

William H Whyte set out to discover why some New York City public

spaces were successes, fi lled with people and activities, while others were empty, cold, and unused After seven years of fi lming small parks and plazas in the city, he found that only a few plazas in New York City were at-

tracting daily users and saw this decline as a threat to urban civility He began to

advocate for viable places where people could meet, relax, and mix in the city

His analysis of those spaces that provided a welcoming and lively environment

became the basis of his now-famous “rules for small urban spaces.” And these

rules were used by the New York City Planning Department to transform the

public spaces in the city

In this new century, we are facing a different kind of threat to public space —

not one of disuse, but of patterns of design and management that exclude some

people and reduce social and cultural diversity In some cases this exclusion is

the result of a deliberate program to reduce the number of undesirables, and in

others, it is a by-product of privatization, commercialization, historic

preserva-tion, and specifi c strategies of design and planning Nonetheless, these practices

can reduce the vitality and vibrancy of the space or reorganize it in such a way

that only one kind of person — often a tourist or middle-class visitor — feels

welcomed One of the consequences is that the number of open, urban public

spaces is decreasing as more and more places are privatized, gated or fenced,

closed for renovation, and /or redesigned to restrict activities These changes

can be observed in Latin America as well as the United States, and they are

drastically reducing the number of places that people can meet and participate

in public life (Low 2000)

These changes are potentially harmful to other democratic practices that

depend on public space and an active public realm for cross-class and

multicul-tural contact At least in New York after 9/11, very few places retain the culmulticul-tural

and social diversity once experienced in all public spaces —but Washington

Square and Union Square still do Further, an increased defensiveness and

de-sire for security has arisen since the terrorist attack Concrete barriers, private

2 R E T H I N K I N G U R B A N P A R K S

guards, and police protect what were previously open spaces and buildings

The threat to public safety comes not only from the outside, but also from the

danger that Americans will overreact to the destruction of the Twin Towers by

barricading themselves, and denying opportunities for expressing a sense of

community, openness, and optimism

Security and Fear of the “Other”

Long before the destruction of the World Trade Center, a concern with

secu-rity had been a centerpiece of the postindustrial American city, expressed in

its fenced-off, policed, and privatized spaces Although many Americans have

based their concerns on a fear of the crime and violence they believe pervades

cities, this antiurban sentiment is often translated into a fear of the “other”

across social classes and has become a mainstay of residential and workplace

segregation ever since the development of suburbs People began moving to the

suburbs to escape the insecurity of dirt, disease, and immigrant populations in

the inner city as soon as trolleys made commuting feasible And suburbs

of-fered more than just a physical distance from the city — a more powerful social

distance emerged, maintained through a complex discourse of racial

stereo-types and class bias

But even within cities, similar forms of social distance took shape Today,

for instance, wealthy New Yorkers satisfy their desire for security by living in

separate zones and limited-access, cooperative apartment buildings Other city

residents rely on neighborhood-watch programs and tolerate increasing

re-strictions on residential behavior Even in the face of declining crime rates, this

urban fear has ended up justifying more rigid controls of urban space

The enhanced fear of terrorism — evidenced by increasingly novel

surveil-lance techniques — is only making it worse New electronic monitoring tactics

are being implemented across the United States Before September 11, 2001,

the prospect that Americans would agree to live their lives under the gaze of

surveillance cameras or real-time police monitoring seemed unlikely But now

some citizens are asking for outdoor cameras to be installed in places like

Vir-ginia Beach to scan faces of people at random, cross-checking them with faces

of criminals stored in a computer database Palm Springs is wiring palm trees

with electronic eyes on the main business street What were once considered

Big Brother technologies and infringements of civil liberties are now widely

treated as necessary for public safety —with little, if any, examination of the

consequences What is at stake is the cost we are paying for this increased

se-curity, measured not just in salaries of increasing numbers of police offi cers or

in retinal-scanning technologies, but also in the loss of freedom of movement

and the cultural diversity in public space that has been so characteristic of the

American way of life

Globalization and Increased Diversity

With increasing globalization this trend has intensifi ed Two countervailing

processes are occurring Large numbers of people are moving from developing

countries to more developed regions to obtain better jobs and education and

increasingly use the public spaces of the city Yet while the macroenvironment

is becoming more diverse because of increased fl ows of immigrants, differences

in local population growth rates, and an overall “browning” of America, local

environments are experiencing increased vernacularization and

homogene-ity — immigrant enclaves are growing in the chomogene-ity, and gated communities are

developing in the suburbs and edge cities In this historical era of cultural and

ethnic polarization, it has become increasingly important to engage in dialogue

about these changes How can we continue to integrate our diverse

communi-ties and promote social tolerance in this new political climate? One way, we

argue, is to make sure that our urban parks, beaches, and heritages sites — those

large urban spaces where we all come together — remain public, in the sense of

providing a place for everyone to relax, learn, and recreate; and open so that we

have places where interpersonal and intergroup cooperation and confl ict can

be worked out in a safe and public forum

In 1990 Setha Low, with the help of Dana Taplin and Suzanne Scheld,

founded the Public Space Research Group (PSRG) within the Center for

Hu-man Environments at the Graduate School and University Center of the City

University of New York to address these issues PSRG brings together

research-ers, community membresearch-ers, and public offi cials in a forum of integrated research,

theory, and policy The group provides a theoretical framework for research

that relates public space to the individual, the community, and to political and

economic forces PSRG is concerned with the social processes that make spaces

into places, with confl icts over access and control of space, and with the values

and meanings people attach to place

In our 15 years of studying cultural uses of large urban parks and heritage

sites, we have observed the local impacts of globalization: more immigrants,

more diversity, new uses of park space, less public money for operations and

maintenance, and greater sharing of management responsibility with private

entities We have also witnessed responses and reactions to these changes such

as efforts to reassert old-order values through historic preservation and to

impose greater control over public spaces through surveillance and physical

reconstruction We have documented how local and cultural

misunderstand-4 R E T H I N K I N G U R B A N P A R K S

ings can escalate into social problems that threaten the surrounding

neighbor-hoods, triggering the same processes that we have seen occurring in small

ur-ban spaces Immigrants, in some ways the mainstay of the U.S economy, after

9/11 have become the “other” who is feared Restrictive management of large

parks has created an increasingly inhospitable environment for immigrants,

local ethnic groups, and culturally diverse behaviors If this trend continues, it

will eradicate the last remaining spaces for democratic practices, places where

a wide variety of people of different gender, class, culture, nationality, and

eth-nicity intermingle peacefully

Lessons for Promoting and Managing Social and Cultural Diversity

Based on our concern that urban parks, beaches, and heritage sites might be

subjected to these same homogenizing forces, we began a series of research

projects to ascertain what activities and management techniques would

en-courage, support, and maintain cultural diversity These projects produced a

series of “lessons” that are similar to William H Whyte’s rules for promoting

the sociability of small urban spaces, but in this case, these lessons promote

and /or maintain cultural diversity Each lesson was derived from one or more

of our park ethnographies and will be illustrated in the following chapters

These lessons are not applicable in all situations, but are meant to provide

a framework and guidelines for culturally sensitive decision making in park

planning, management, and design They can be summarized in the following

six statements:

1 If people are not represented in historical national parks and ments or, more importantly, if their histories are erased, they will not use the park

monu-2 Access is as much about economics and cultural patterns of park use

as circulation and transportation; thus, income and visitation patterns must be taken into consideration when providing access for all social groups

3 The social interaction of diverse groups can be maintained and hanced by providing safe, spatially adequate territories for everyone within the larger space of the overall site

en-4 Accommodating the differences in the ways social class and ethnic groups use and value public sites is essential to making decisions that sustain cultural and social diversity

5 Contemporary historic preservation should not concentrate on ing the scenic features without also restoring the facilities and diversions that attract people to a park

restor-6 Symbolic ways of communicating cultural meaning are an important

dimension of place attachment that can be fostered to promote cultural diversity

These lessons for promoting and sustaining cultural diversity in urban parks

and heritage sites are just a beginning More research and experimentation will

be needed to fully understand the importance and diffi culties of

maintain-ing vibrant public spaces But at the very least, the lessons demonstrate how

diversity can be an essential component of evaluating the success of any

hu-man ecosystem The remainder of this chapter discusses the theoretical and

the practical rationales for our position We feel it is not enough to assert that

cultural and social diversity is critical to large urban sites; the argument needs

to be substantiated by current social theory and practice There are economic

as well as ethical reasons for considering diversity as essential to the success of

any urban place This chapter lays the groundwork for explaining why it is so

critical to planning, designing, and managing large urban spaces in the future

Theoretical Framework

Social Sustainability

What do we mean by “social sustainability”? Following David Throsby’s (1995)

discussion, sustainability refers to the evolutionary or lasting qualities of the

phenomena, avoidance of short-term or temporary solutions, and a concern

with the self-generating or self-perpetuating characteristics of a system (Throsby

1995) Drawing a parallel with natural ecosystems that support and maintain

a “natural balance,” “cultural ecosystems” support and maintain cultural life

and human civilization (Throsby 1999a, 1999b) Sustainable development is the

preservation and enhancement of the environment through the maintenance

of natural ecosystems, while culturally sustainable development refers to the

preservation of arts and society’s attitudes, practices, and beliefs

Social sustainability is a subset of cultural sustainability; it includes the

maintenance and preservation of social relations and meanings that reinforce

cultural systems Social sustainability specifi cally refers to maintaining and

enhancing the diverse histories, values, and relationships of contemporary

populations But to truly understand social sustainability, we need to expand

Throsby’s analysis by adding three critical dimensions:

1 p lac e p r es e rvat ionCultural ecosystems are located in time and space — for a cultural ecosystem

to be maintained or conserved, its place(s) must be preserved (Proshansky,

Fabian, Kaminoff 1983; Low 1987) Cultural conservation and sustainability

6 R E T H I N K I N G U R B A N P A R K S

require place preservation This rather obvious point is crucial when dealing

with the material environment and issues of cultural representation

2 cu l tu r al ecology t h eor i esAnthropologists employ a variety of theories of how cultural ecosystems work

in particular places over time For example, Bennett (1968; also see Netting

1993) modeled the ecological dynamics of natural systems to understand

socio-political changes in the cultural ecosystems of farmers Cohen (1968) developed

a cultural evolutionary scheme to predict settlement patterns and sociocultural

development in the developing regions Many of these cultural ecology theories

have been subjected to historical critiques; nonetheless, the dynamic and

pre-dictive aspects of cultural ecosystem models are useful when examining social

change on a particular site (Barlett and Chase 2004)

The case of historic Parque Central in San José, Costa Rica, illustrates this

Figure 1.1 shine men in Parque Central in San José, Costa Rica

Shoe-Figure 1.2 Pensioners

in Parque Central in San José, Costa Rica

point Up until 1992 Parque Central was a well-established, spatially organized

cultural ecosystem made up of shoeshine men on the northeast corner (fi

g-ure 1.1), pensioners on the southwest corner (fi gg-ure 1.2), vendors and religious

practitioners on the northwest corner (fi gure 1.3), and prostitutes and

work-men on the center inner circle The established cultural ecosystem, however,

was disrupted in 1993 when the municipality closed the park and redesigned the

historic space (fi gure 1.4) to remove users perceived as unattractive to tourists

and the middle class (Low 2000)

The redesign, however, destroyed the social ecological balance A new social

group, a gang of young men, took over the public space, creating a dangerous

and even more undesirable environment, and Nicaraguans, rather than Costa

Ricans, became the main inhabitants on Sundays This case illustrates the

fra-gility of existing cultural ecosystems (and their diverse niches); when the

socio-spatial niches (places) are destroyed, the system may not be able to maintain

Figure 1.3 Vendors and religious practitioners in Parque Central

Figure 1.4

Redesigned Parque Central

8 R E T H I N K I N G U R B A N P A R K S

itself any more effectively than before the intervention In fact, the redesign of

a site, ostensibly to improve it, may create more problems and dysfunction if

the social ecology of the space is overlooked

3 cu l tu r al d iv e r s i tyThe third important dimension is cultural diversity Biological diversity, so

critical to the physical environment as a genetic repository and pool of adaptive

evolutionary strategies, has its social counterpart in cultural diversity Cultural

diversity became a “politically correct” catchphrase during the 1980s in the

United States, but it has not been addressed in planning and design — much less

sustainable development — practice While sustainable development includes

“maintaining cultural diversity” as a conceptual goal, there is little agreement,

much less research, on what it means But cultural diversity provides a way to

evaluate cultural and social sustainability, and is one observable outcome of the

continuity of human groups in culturally signifi cant places

This modifi ed cultural ecosystem /diversity model provides an effective

the-oretical basis for defi ning social sustainability But social sustainability

encom-passes more than understanding cultural ecosystems and diversity It implies

a moral and political stance to sustain sociocultural systems — maintaining

them, supporting them, and in some cases, improving them And it is in this

sense that a new series of questions must be asked Is social sustainability

ap-plicable to all populations? We have been assuming that human ecosystems

do not compete with each other, but of course they do A successful cultural

system can overrun another Is this what we mean by sustainability — natural

selection of cultural ecosystems, and the fi ttest survives based on an

evolu-tionary or sociobiological model? Or should we be protecting weaker groups,

systems, urban niches from stronger ones? And who is the we? These are moral

and political questions that must be addressed in discussions of application and

practice

Ultimately, when we discuss social sustainability, we need to address issues

at various scales: the local, the regional, and the global Social sustainability

at the local scale has been illustrated by the examples discussed so far, that is,

understanding the cultural dynamics of a place so that specifi c individuals

and their histories and values are sustained at or near the park or heritage site,

across generations, and over time At the regional scale, social sustainability

might be better conceptualized through a broader plan that supports not only

individuals but also neighborhoods, communities, churches, associations, and

the institutional infrastructure necessary for the survival of cultural values and

places of larger groups throughout history Dolores Hayden’s The Power of Place

(1995; see also Hayden 1990) provides a vision of documenting and

commemo-rating cultural histories of minorities and women that goes beyond the local

and sustains larger elements of society Social sustainability at the global scale

moves closer to David Throsby’s “sustainable development” based on

intergen-erational, and cultural, equity and environmental justice

Thus, social sustainability is the successful maintenance of existing cultural

ecosystems and cultural diversity It is safeguarded when the systems of social

relations and meanings are inclusive, rather than exclusive In this sense, social

sustainability is fostered by understanding the intimate relationship between

history, values, cultural representation, and patterns of use in any culturally

diverse context In fact, the inclusion of local people, their histories, and their

values ultimately strengthens any park’s long-term social sustainability

Cultural Property Rights

An equally powerful argument for cultural diversity can be made in terms of

the ethics of respecting cultural property rights At the most basic level, ethics

is the consideration of the right way to live one’s life, particularly with regard

to interpersonal behavior (Lefkowitz 2003) But while ethics is about doing the

right thing, it does not necessarily mean the same thing in each situation Stated

broadly, it is about being accountable for your actions and avoiding harm to

others, but interpreted in specifi c social, cultural, and historical situations

Chris Johnston and Kristal Buckley (2001), when discussing the importance

of cultural inclusion in heritage conservation practice, point out that ethics

translates cultural values into actions This translation is most easily seen in

cross-cultural or multicultural situations where many of the cultural

assump-tions and values differ Johnston and Buckley provide the example of how the

Australian Archaeological Association developed a code of ethics to regulate

the principles and conduct of its members in relation to Australian Aboriginal

and Torres Strait Islander peoples “Among other things, this document

ac-knowledges the indigenous ownership of cultural heritage knowledge and the

primacy of the importance of heritage places to indigenous people” (2001, 89)

In this way, the Australian Archaeological Association defi ned what its

ethi-cal relationship to indigenous cultural knowledge ownership would be and set

boundaries for appropriate behavior with regard to indigenous peoples and

their cultural heritage

At the heart of the argument about cultural property rights are questions

about who owns the past and who has the right or responsibility to preserve the

cultural remains of the past “These questions raise important philosophical

issues about the past They also bring to the fore both the diversity of values

associated with the preservation of cultural properties and the confl icts of

1 0 R E T H I N K I N G U R B A N P A R K S

interests of the various parties to the dispute” (Warren 1989, 5) Karen Warren

(1989) suggests that the way to understand the various arguments that occur

in a dispute is to organize them by what she calls the “3 R’s”: 1) the restitution

of cultural properties to their countries of origin, 2) the restriction of imports

and exports of cultural properties, and 3) the retention of rights by different

parties

Within each of these categories, numerous arguments have been used to

substantiate why traditional or native cultural property rights should not be

respected For example, Warren (1989) identifi es the use of “the rescue

argu-ment” against cultural property claims by countries of origin when the cultural

properties at issue would have been destroyed if they had not been “rescued”

by foreigners with the ability to preserve them Those who rescued the cultural

properties now argue that they have a valid claim to them Other arguments

along these lines include the “scholarly access argument”— that scholars will

not have adequate access if cultural materials are returned to their country or

culture of origin, the “foreign ownership argument,” and the “humanity

own-ership argument,” all of which have been used to dispute country-of-origin

claims To resolve these antagonistic disputes Warren offers an integrative

per-spective that emphasizes preservation as a goal and incorporates compromise

and consensus models for settling cultural property matters The importance

of her solution, however, resides in her underlying ethical position that

ac-knowledges the importance of the diversity of values and perspectives involved

in any resolution of cultural heritage issues

Museums such as the Smithsonian Institution also fi nd themselves at the

center of these ethical arguments Ivan Karp (1992) suggests that “an acute

moral dilemma is raised by the acknowledgment that museums have

responsi-bilities to communities” (11) From this perspective questions arise about what

happens when one community makes a request that hurts or constrains

an-other community or that uses up a resource that would an-otherwise be shared

Museums must decide who speaks for a community and whether the claims of

different groups are equally valid In the case of the repatriation of material

ar-tifacts, local as well as national communities and cultural groups are interested

in how museums make their decisions and conduct their affairs

In order to adjudicate cultural property claims fairly, then, it is necessary

that all communities and cultural groups are included in the discussion And,

we argue, there needs to be a place where they can meet and consider issues on

an ongoing basis Heritage sites and urban parks are just two examples of

pub-lic spaces where these discussions can begin The ethical imperative of cultural

property rights for those whose “culture” or “environment” is being utilized

or controlled by others rests on assumptions that power should be equitably

distributed and that all cultural groups have rights to their native inheritance

and /or home places The same argument can be used to stress the importance

of maintaining the cultural diversity of parks, beaches, and heritage sites

Community Participation, Empowerment, and Citizenship

But cultural property rights are not the only way to think about these

ethi-cal issues Wendy Sarkissian and Donald Perlgut (1986) give two reasons for

seeking community involvement in the use of parks and heritage sites: 1) it is

ethical, that is, in a democratic society, people whose lives and environments

are directly affected should be consulted and involved, and 2) it is pragmatic

because people must support programs and policies in order to mobilize their

participation One might add that the cost of top-down approaches to

main-taining parks is staggering and that few governments can afford the economic

costs of imposing external controls Yet the benefi ts of collaborative approaches

have not been fully realized Even though community members who use a park

often possess the knowledge and physical proximity to park resources, they are

frequently not included in the planning and maintenance processes This may

be because of mistaken attitudes on the part of park administrators about the

capabilities of residents and users, and because park managers do not have the

staff, language, or collaborative training to work effectively with local

commu-nity groups (Borrini-Feyerabend 1997)

Discussions of community participation and empowerment have become

increasingly important as cities have become more ethnically diverse and more

demographically and racially divided (Gantt 1993) Parks that originally served

relatively homogeneous white middle-class or working-class neighborhoods

must now provide recreation, educational and social programs, and relaxation

for an increasingly multicultural and multiclass population Mayors and city

council members, as well as park managers and planners, are hard-pressed

to mediate the confl icts that arise as park resources are stretched thin and as

neighborhoods deteriorate because of the inability of local government to

pro-vide adequate services for all residents And as we already know from the

his-tory of decreasing municipal funding, parks and heritage sites are low priorities

when education and health care needs loom large

The question arises, then, whether increased cultural diversity in the city

can be utilized to improve the lives of residents (Gantt 1993) We argue that it

can by empowering local groups to voice their needs and claim their histories

in both local and national park contexts By empowering communities to claim

park resources as their own and to engage in the decision-making process

that allocates funds and labor for park maintenance and programming, park

1 2 R E T H I N K I N G U R B A N P A R K S

managers gain collaborators in keeping the park attended, safe, and

well-maintained At the same time, city administrators and park planners learn

more about the diverse needs of ever-changing neighborhood social and

cul-tural groups and their values, making it possible to more accurately match

cultural group needs with available resources

There are a number of urban programs that have used community

partici-pation and empowerment strategies to structure the running of local cultural

resources and park offi ces For example, the “Charleston Principles” of Seattle,

Washington, require that any proposed change include a community cultural

planning process involving a broad spectrum of community members —

pub-lic agencies, civic and social groups, educators and students, business and

economic interests, artists, community leaders, and cultural organizations of

all types In this way, community empowerment is a legally mandated part of

any planning and design process (King County Landmarks and Heritage

Pro-gram 1999)

Another example is “Taking Action,” a project in Australia that has produced

a handbook for actively involving communities in heritage projects (Johnston

and Clarke 2001) Using the same ethical and practical arguments we have

dis-cussed here, the authors see community involvement as part of participatory

democracy whether a project is run by an elected government or initiated and

directed by the community itself By involving the community, it is possible to:

1) understand community aspirations and values, 2) fi nd out about community

needs, 3) learn about the locality and community, 4) share perspectives, 5) fi nd

out about differences as well as similarities, and 6) ultimately create new

solu-tions that draw upon a wider range of ideas (2001, 3) Johnston and Clarke’s

report supplies a checklist of ways to communicate with people and involve

cultural groups, and it is an excellent guide for beginning any community

in-volvement project

Other collaborative programs emphasize the inclusion of indigenous

com-munities often overlooked in park planning and administration and

marginal-ized by local politics Barbara Harrison (2001) summarizes the experiences of

working with indigenous groups and researchers in North America as well as

New Zealand and Australia to develop her guide to collaborative working

rela-tionships in research and applied practice

The concept of citizenship, and its accompanying rights, underlies each of

these projects The liberal notion of citizenship defi nes people as

individu-als who have civil, political, and social rights within the nation-state But this

defi nition is limited in that citizenship must also be considered full

ship of a community within a neighborhood, region, or state, and

member-ship of individuals within one or more community groups Citizenmember-ship should

be understood as inclusive of state, regional, neighborhood, and community

levels of individual participation, thus producing a multistranded and

multi-layered model of the sociopolitical relationship of people and society

(Yuval-Davis 1998)

Most debates over citizenship are about the basic right of entry into a

coun-try —whether a person can stay, maintain a residence, and not be

repatri-ated — and about work-status issues, participatory duties such as voting, and

availability of social welfare benefi ts But these same notions can be applied to

the rights of individuals and groups to participate in decisions about places,

resources, and services that touch their lives We argue that citizenship also

should focus on the role that individuals and communities play in determining

the success or failure of their local open spaces and historic resources Full

citi-zenship includes community involvement and participation in the ongoing life

of the neighborhood and region, and as such it provides another justifi cation

for community empowerment and participation in park planning processes If

all community and cultural groups are included, then we are also empowering

citizen-leaders and participants who will continue to contribute to the area and

its growth and stability over time

Dissonant Heritage, Negative Heritage, and the Politics of Meaning

With the empowerment of community and cultural groups, however, there

emerges a set of problems and confl icts that J E Tunbridge and G J Ashworth

(1996) have called “dissonant heritage.” The concept of dissonant heritage is

derived from the idea that heritage is a contemporary product shaped by

his-tory in which different narratives exist Dissonance in heritage suggests a

dis-cordance in these histories and lack of agreement and consistency in the way

that the past is represented (Tunbridge and Ashworth 1996) Dissonant heritage

is present whenever there is more than one meaning for an object, place, or

landscape; most often it is embedded in a confl ict between tourism and sacred

use of a site or between global and local meanings (Graham, Ashworth, and

Tunbridge 2000)

The creation of any heritage site — and any park, we would add

—“poten-tially disinherits or excludes those who do not subscribe to, or are embraced

within, the terms of meaning defi ning that heritage” (Graham, Ashworth, and

Tunbridge 2000, 24) It is a common condition in multicultural societies in

which inclusiveness is determined by a group’s proximity to political and

eco-nomic power Despite the development of pluralist societies, heritage — and

many other aspects of the landscape and built environment — often refl ects only

the dominant culture Certain European societies typically do not acknowledge

1 4 R E T H I N K I N G U R B A N P A R K S

their former colonial subjects (Graham, Ashworth, and Tunbridge 2000), while

white Americans often avoid recognizing their being the benefi ciaries of slavery

and the early dependence on slave labor in the plantation economy

Kenneth E Foote (1997) addresses these issues of unresolved meaning

and the politics of memory by arguing that the invisibility of some violent or

tragic events, especially those dealing with minority populations such as

Afri-can AmeriAfri-cans or Latinos, indicates a certain tolerance or acceptance of such

events as part of American life (294) Other tragic events, such as the Battle of

Gettysburg, are celebrated as fundamental to understanding the American past

This dual tendency — to ignore and to celebrate — refl ects Americans’

ambiva-lence toward events that both bind and divide us and “casts un unusual shadow

over American history and the American landscape” (Foote 1997, 294) Thus,

the practice of telling all sides of the story and of uncovering uncomfortable

and confl icting views of the past that produce dissonant heritage has never

been popular But the pervasiveness of dissonant heritage is vital to our

dis-cussion of urban parks and public spaces in that it provides another rationale

for why cultural diversity and community inclusiveness are so important The

negotiation of dissonant meanings and their resolution in forms representative

of all cultural groups and communities is the ideal toward which we should be

working

Cultural Values

In historical preservation practice “values,” like ethics, means the morals and

ideas that guide action as well as the specifi c qualities and positive

character-istics of things as seen by a particular person or group (Mason 2002)

Socio-logical approaches consider values “generalized beliefs about what is or is not

desirable, but also as motives that infl uence people’s actions” (Feather 1992,

111) Psychologists such as Joel Lefkowitz (2003), on the other hand, defi ne

val-ues as “relatively stable cognitive representations of what the person believes

are desirable standards of conduct or generalized end states” (139; also see 151);

Lefkowitz adds that values have emotional and evaluative importance to one’s

ideal self-concept, and provide motivation for people’s actions and choices In

our discussion, we draw upon elements of each of these defi nitions and utilize

the concept to refer to the meanings and feelings, positive or negative, that

people attribute to their lives, environment, actions and behaviors, and world

as a whole Values, however, are not inherent in an object, action, or landscape

but are contingent on the circumstances — the place, time, and company — in

which a judgment is being made As opposed to the psychological defi nition of

values as relatively fi xed and stable within a person, our perspective identifi es

community values as often fl uid and changing, although they may be relatively

fi xed depending on the domain

“Cultural values” refers to the shared meanings associated with people’s

lives, environments, and actions that draw upon cultural affi liation and living

together They are often expressed as value judgments, that is to say,

some-thing is considered bad or good depending on how it registers with a person’s

or group’s attitudes at a particular moment These value judgments, usually

expressed as liking or disliking some person, place, or object, provide

informa-tion about underlying unspoken cultural assumpinforma-tions, beliefs, and practices

Cultural values are our best indicators as to what people think and feel about

a landscape such as a park or heritage site, and they can act as a guide to

un-derstanding park use and disuse, place attachment or lack of it, and symbolic

meanings According to Randall Mason, “sociocultural values are at the

tradi-tional core of conservation —values attached to an object, building, or place

because it holds meaning for people or social groups due to its age, beauty,

artistry, or association with a signifi cant person or event or (otherwise)

con-tributes to processes of cultural affi liation” (2002, 11)

We would add that cultural values also accrue to objects, buildings, and

landscapes through living in a place for a long period of time, working in a

place, narrating stories and telling myths about a place, and engaging in any

activity that would generate a relationship between a person or group and a

particular location This kind of “cultural place attachment” (Altman and Low

1992; Low 1992) often develops between people and places, particularly places

such as parks, beaches, and heritage sites that have potential meaning and

cul-tural signifi cance through their ongoing use and role in memory making

One important concern when discussing cultural values is that the term

cul-tural is politically as well as socially constructed and manipulated for a variety

of ends Cultural values, similar to cultural identities, are not necessarily defi

n-able attributes that can be measured or codifi ed, but they must be understood

as negotiated, fl uid, and context-dependent The political importance of a

neighborhood can change depending on how the residents present themselves

and their values to the various players involved Sociopolitically constructed

cultural labels such as black, African American, white, Jamaican, or Haitian

evoke different meanings and responses from New York City offi cials and

plan-ners and are actively manipulated by the community in neighborhood

descrip-tions and media coverage (Low 1994) Poor people and their values, however,

are often the most vulnerable because the local constituency does not have the

political and economic power to struggle against the defi nitions and decisions

of government offi cials and private entrepreneurs

Further, processes of cultural hegemony — that is, the preeminence of one

1 6 R E T H I N K I N G U R B A N P A R K S

cultural group’s ideas and values over another’s — maintain the control of

middle- to upper-middle-class white values over the defi nitions of what can

be considered relevant to other cultural groups in a neighborhood or region

(Lawrence and Low 1990) The values of planners, managers, administrators,

designers, and National Park Service employees are also hegemonic because of

the entrenched belief that professionals know more than the local community

Yet when elites and professionals dictate what should happen to an urban space,

their landscape preferences do not necessarily correspond to the needs and

de-sires of the local users

Cultural values and their representation in park planning and renovation

processes are decisive in producing programs that will work in a specifi c

com-munity location Prospect Park, discussed in Chapter 3, is an excellent example

of how local cultural values do not necessarily match the values of the

profes-sionals who are managing the park and making decisions about renovations

and fi nancial investment in the park’s future Relying on professional expertise

rather than taking seriously cultural values about park resources reinforces the

traditional inequality of power relations and exacerbates race and class confl ict

already in evidence Another example of the importance of understanding

cul-tural values is discussed in Chapter 4, on the Ellis Island Bridge Proposal

His-toric preservationists did not understand why it would be important to build a

bridge for local residents until they confronted the value placed on visiting the

park in large family groups by the black community Suddenly the $7.50 price

of a ferry became $75.00 for 10 family members, putting visiting or attending

programs or activities out of the reach of these families

What Is Cultural Diversity Good For?

Ulf Hannerz (1996) suggests that the value of diversity is so entrenched in the

contemporary discourse about culture that it is diffi cult to refl ect clearly on it

So he offers what he calls his “seven arguments for diversity” to make the point

that there are many basic reasons to consider cultural diversity important to

our lives He includes many of the points that we have made in this discussion

and adds others that we have not emphasized, arguing that cultural diversity is

important because it provides:

1 the moral right to one’s culture, including one’s cultural heritage and cultural identity;

2 the ecological advantage of different orientations and adaptations to limited environmental resources;

3 a form of cultural resistance to political and economic domination

by elites and power asymmetries and a way to counteract relations of dependency;

4 the aesthetic sense and pleasurable experience of different worldviews,

ways of thinking, and of other cultures in their own right;

5 the possibility of confrontation between cultures that can generate new

cultural processes;

6 a source of creativity; and

7 a fund of tested knowledge about ways of going about things (Hannerz

1996, 56 –57)

We would add that attention to cultural diversity also leads to community

empowerment, expanded citizenship, and the involvement of people in the

governance and maintenance of their neighborhoods and workplaces It

ex-pands the notion of individual rights of citizenship to include the survival of

one’s culture and /or cultural group, and the marking of its importance in the

landscape We would also add that creativity from cultural contact and

interac-tion fl ows from cooperainterac-tion as well as from working out soluinterac-tions to confl icts

and confrontation Therefore, cultural diversity, utilized effectively and

hon-estly, leads to more democratic practices and peaceful relationships between

people within a locality especially if all groups are treated equally with respect

for their needs, desires, and adequate space and resources for work, home, and

recreation

We end this introduction where we began, by asserting how crucial

under-standing cultural diversity and community values is to having a successful park,

beach, or heritage site Assessing social and cultural values remains the best way

to monitor changes in the local neighborhood or region, and we offer a

num-ber of ways to elicit and collect these values in the following examples Each

case study emphasizes one of the lessons for large urban spaces For example,

Independence National Historical Park focuses on cultural representation and

its impact on local group attendance But each case also encompasses all of the

lessons Any inclusive urban space exemplifi es many of these principles and

others that we have not yet examined

This book begins a conversation between social scientists — anthropologists

and environmental psychologists — and the decision makers who direct,

de-sign, plan, and manage our nation’s parks, beaches, and heritage sites The goal

is to contribute what we have learned from our research experiences to making

urban parks the best places they can be for the most people Parks offer urban

residents a place away from home that is essential to their physical and

men-1 8 R E T H I N K I N G U R B A N P A R K S

tal health and well-being This is particularly true for the poor and

working-class residents who do not have backyards, much less vacation homes, where

they can rest and recreate We hope the lessons and the research on which they

are based help to improve and promote these socially important and wonderful

places — the urban parks, beaches, and heritage sites of New York and the rest

of the Northeast

Organization of This VolumeThe book includes case studies drawn from our research on National Park

Service parks, seashores, and heritage sites: The Ellis Island Bridge Proposal

(Chapter 4), Jacob Riis Park in the Gateway National Recreation Area

(Chap-ter 5), and Independence National Historical Park (Chap(Chap-ter 7), as well as two

case examples drawn from our work on New York City parks: Prospect Park

(Chapter 3) and Orchard Beach in Pelham Bay Park (Chapter 6) Chapter 8

provides the methodological background and specifi c anthropological research

techniques used to gather these data for those interested in undertaking this

type of research in their own parks and communities The conclusion revisits

the six lessons we identify for promoting, maintaining, and managing cultural

diversity in urban parks and refl ects on what was learned from this long-term

research project on urban park policy

Urban Parks

History and Social Context

As Michael Brill (1989), Sam Bass Warner (1993), and perhaps others have

noted, the variety of park types has multiplied since parks fi rst appeared

in North America in the early nineteenth century Many kinds of public spaces fall under the general rubric of “park.” The case studies in this volume

are a sampling of urban park types: a landscape park, two recreational beach

parks, and two historical parks To situate these cases from New York and

Phila-delphia within a national context, this chapter provides a comparative review

of the history of various park types in the United States

The fi rst urban parks in the United States were relatively unimproved

commons, places originally set aside for grazing cattle and training militias

New York’s original common is now the heavily gated City Hall Park Boston

Common is perhaps the best example of the type Set aside only six years

af-ter the original settlement, Boston Common has maintained its 44 acres and

something of the informal, unornamented character of a colonial common

Straight, paved paths lined with benches crisscross its territory in practical

fash-ion, enabling people to cross over easily in their travels about town Large trees

shade the grass-covered ground with no shrubs, ornamental trees, fl ower beds,

or other plant varieties to complicate the picture The Common has several

frankly recreational facilities: tennis courts, ball fi eld, children’s playground,

and seasonal skating /wading pond Like many smaller city squares in New York

and elsewhere, Boston Common is more an extension of urban space than a

refuge from it No perimeter plantings screen the surrounding cityscape from

view Rather, much of the character of the place comes from the visibility of

adjacent structures from within the grounds

Boston Common was less parklike before the early nineteenth century The

1820 –1840 period brought a movement to create tree-lined paths for

stroll-ing by the fashionable citizens who lived nearby (Domosh 1998) The formal

paths and tree-lined promenades date from this period, and the practice of

grazing cattle was ended Similar improvements were made at this time to the

coarse open spaces of town commons and squares throughout New England,

New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio Philadelphia’s original fi ve squares were

similarly devoid of landscaping until this time, when paths were laid and trees

2 0 R E T H I N K I N G U R B A N P A R K S

planted Today, Rittenhouse Square functions like Boston Common as a simply

planted, central open space that complements the urban concentration that

surrounds it Full of people sitting and strolling, lying on the grass, playing

ball, or listening to buskers and soapbox orators, these simple places are about

as close as eastern North American cities come to the Latin American plaza

J B Jackson (1984) stresses the essentially political character of these urban

plazas: in them one is revealed as a citizen

The Landscape ParkUrban landscape parks, beginning with Central Park in New York, have quite

different origins Typically much larger than squares and commons, they were

designed as refuges from the city according to an exacting aesthetic formula

that simulated the idealized English and North American countryside Prospect

Park in Brooklyn, among the best examples of the type, encompassed 526 acres

and incorporated pastures, woods, gathering places, and systems of surface

wa-ters, carriage drives, and footpaths It was designed by the fi rm of Frederick Law

Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, beginning in 1866, several years after their fi rst and

most famous design collaboration that produced Central Park Unlike the older

urban squares, Prospect Park kept the surrounding city out of view with a high,

thickly planted earthen berm along its perimeter

Prospect Park was a product of the park movement that swept through

North America during a 50-year period beginning in the 1840s The movement

had philosophical, theological, and nationalistic sources The philosophical

ba-sis lay in romanticism and its belief that nature and natural scenery had the

power to uplift and restore the human spirit Romanticism arose in reaction to

the effects of industrial capitalism evident already in the 1840s and 1850s —

rap-idly growing cities, tenement housing crowded with immigrants, factory life,

epidemic disease, and smoke Romanticism took many forms of expression,

one of them being landscape gardening The landscape gardener sought to

ar-range nature’s best qualities in prospects of quiet repose The romantic

sensibil-ity in gardening called for a naturalistic imitation of nature, rejecting the once

dominant baroque design idiom of straight lines in formal perspective

The new parks had several precedents, including new public parks in

Eng-land, the older royal parks in many European cities that had by then been

opened to public use, and rural cemeteries like Mount Auburn in Cambridge,

Massachusetts Mount Auburn’s designers strove for “a picturesque effect”

com-posed of serpentine walks and paths, groves of dark woods, ponds, clearings,

and ornamental plantings of trees, shrubs, and fl owers (Von Hoffman 1994,

73) The garden cemetery idea soon spread, bringing about Green-Wood

Cem-etery in Brooklyn, Laurel Hill CemCem-etery in Philadelphia, and others Mount

Auburn Cemetery and its progeny soon became popular resorts for outings

and picnics among middle-class city dwellers The rural cemetery was an

im-portant precursor to the urban landscape park in demonstrating the popularity

of a romantic landscape of winding paths, groves of trees, ponds, and beautiful

views These cemeteries whetted the public appetite for large parks

Contrasting vernacular traditions in recreational landscapes coexisted with

the development of formal parks One such landscape tradition was the

unde-signed and unplanned, but popular, common open space In the small town

and growing city alike, informal open spaces lying just outside the developed

area were appropriated for outings, get-togethers, picnics, sports, and games

These spaces are hard to document because they were not formally planned,

designated, or designed, and most gave way to urban development long ago

Jackson (1984) contrasts the formal town park of the mid-nineteenth century —

Figure 2.1 Romantic detail— Cleftridge Span in Prospect Park

2 2 R E T H I N K I N G U R B A N P A R K S

typically very pretty but empty of people —with the lively grove just outside

town, often along a river There, on level ground under the big cottonwood

trees and along grassy banks, townspeople would gather on a Sunday afternoon

for informal activities of all kinds Such places outside the larger cities were

largely working-class resorts avoided by more fastidious citizens: “they were

crowded, boisterous, and sometimes violent” (Jackson 1984, 114) In sharp

con-trast, the new landscape parks substituted the aristocratic garden for the

old-est, most popular kind of play space — sizable areas where common people

could exercise and play and enjoy themselves and participate in community

life (Jackson 1984)

Another vernacular tradition was that of the commercial pleasure ground

Several popular pleasure grounds existed in and around New York:

Rosenz-weig and Blackmar (1992) cite Niblos, Palace Gardens, at Sixth Avenue and

14th Street, and Harlem Gardens Jones Wood, around 61st Street along the

East River, was considered as a site for what became Central Park Hoboken,

New Jersey, offered the Elysian fi elds, one of the places where baseball was fi rst

played, which included level open ground and a landscaped eminence

over-looking the Hudson River Another popular resort for day trips stood at New

Brighton, Staten Island London had its pleasure grounds, among them

Vaux-hall Gardens, Ranelagh, and Cremorne Gardens (Whitaker and Browne 1971)

One of the few such places that survives today is Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens

The pleasure grounds “liberally mixed all styles of art and decoration to

create recreational spaces that responded to popular desires for novelty and

di-version.” Their eclectic style featured statues, fountains, grottos, arbors, artistic

displays, and tents for refreshments or performances “Lively crowds engaged

in picnics, festivals, and sports in the shady groves and open pastures of former

farms or gentlemen’s country seats” (Rosenzweig and Blackmar 1992, 104)

During the planning of Central Park, some New Yorkers hoped for a synthesis

of the vernacular aesthetic of the pleasure ground with the English naturalistic

landscape tradition exemplifi ed by the rural cemetery.1 Most park proponents,

however, regarded the eclectic enticements of commercial pleasure grounds

as vulgarities Whether Central Park would adopt the English landscape style

or the characteristically geometric style of French and German parks, the

in-fl uence of gentlemen gardeners and other sophisticated advocates meant that

Central Park was certain to adhere to a strict aesthetic standard

Although planned as places of healthful recreation for all classes, landscape parks were built to middle-class standards (Taylor 1999) This environment of

seamless coherence between polite middle-class behavior and a graceful,

taste-fully furnished landscape would “naturally” compel the working-class users

to emulate their social betters If emulation was not forthcoming, widespread

supervision and enforcement effectively curtailed unsuitable behavior In

ad-dition to active sports, working-class recreation in the nineteenth century often

involved excessive drinking, exuberant park play, demonstrations of power, and

loud, rowdy behavior, in compensation for the rigor, monotony, and boredom

of the job The confl icts that sometimes occurred between working-class

be-havior and middle-class mores resulted in the criminalization of certain forms

of behavior (Taylor 1999)

The Movement Spreads

Other parks in North America designed by Olmsted and Vaux or Olmsted

and other collaborators include Franklin Park and the Arnold Arboretum in

Boston; Delaware Park in Buffalo; Highland and Seneca parks in Rochester,

New York; Lake Park in Milwaukee; Cherokee, Iroquois, and Shawnee parks in

Louisville, Kentucky; and Mount Royal Park in Montreal Olmsted designed

a great many other landscapes as well— residential subdivisions and one

en-tire suburb (Riverside, Ill.), campuses, cemeteries, and private estates including

Biltmore, near Asheville, North Carolina Many more city parks designed by

others have much in common with the Olmsted tradition Some were the work

of Olmsted’s sons and successors, the Olmsted Brothers

Rather than preserving existing landscapes of high scenic and ecological

value, like so many later park projects, these early parks were designed and

built often on degraded sites Olmsted and others of the time wanted to create

great social spaces out of the materials of nature The lakes, streams, waterfalls,

and pastures were created Part of the great expense of building Central Park,

for example, was the cost of blasting rock outcrops to create the level expanse

of the “Sheep Meadow.” Ample provisions for public use were built too: the

carriage drives, concert groves, promenades, “refectories,” and boathouses

Olmsted himself fought to keep the balance in his parks in favor of

natu-ral surfaces, warding off demands to give space over for recreational facilities,

for museums and zoos, and for monuments and memorials Heckscher (1977)

shows how Forest Park in St Louis fi lled up over time with such facilities

De-signed by Olmsted followers in a restful Olmstedian confi guration of

curvilin-ear drives, open fi elds, and groves of trees, the park was transformed by serving

as the site for the St Louis Exposition of 1904; many trees were felled, leaving

exhibition buildings in place “Thereafter, every time a new institution was

created or a new entertainment devised, Forest Park seemed the natural place

to put it Today the park contains a zoo , a fi ne arts museum, a planetarium,

an ice-skating rink, a municipal opera and three golf courses, as well as much

space given over to parking” (Heckscher 1977, 176) In recent years, Forest Park

2 4 R E T H I N K I N G U R B A N P A R K S

has undergone a comprehensive regeneration program aimed in part at

restor-ing some sense of the natural amid its collection of civic institutions and

recre-ational facilities (Landscape Architecture 1998).

Public Reservations and State ParksPelham Bay Park, the other New York landscape park studied in this volume, is

representative of the paradigm shift in metropolitan parks after the fi rst run of

landscape parks This was the metropolitan woodland reservation, pioneered

in the United States during the 1890s in the Boston area, under the leadership

of Charles Eliot, a partner in the Olmsted fi rm Olmsted’s work for Boston had

already produced a chain of constructed parks within the city limits linked by

landscaped carriage drives, or “parkways.” Olmsted’s Boston work modeled his

belief that cities needed not just a single park, but a park system to bring the

benefi ts of natural scenery within walking distance of all residents Eliot and

others built on this idea by working to create a system of public grounds over

the whole metropolitan area In its land acquisitions, the Metropolitan Park

Commission focused on areas of intrinsic scenic value to create large

“reserva-tions” of wooded and watered land open to the public These they linked to the

urban core with a series of parkways and boulevards — still motorless in the

1890s A second focus of the commission’s acquisitions was beaches and

river-banks Much of the work of establishing public reservations in shoreline areas

required the acquisition and clearance of private structures and the building of

parkways along them to provide access (Haglund 2003)

Metropolitan reservations like Boston’s, or the larger Chicago Forest Preserve system, were different from the earlier parks in preserving existing landscapes

rather than creating idealized scenery Eliot urged minor modifi cations such

as cutting trees that blocked scenic views over a valley or maintaining existing

clearings for their scenic value Streetcar companies built lines that brought

the reservations within reach of city dwellers lacking their own carriages Still,

these were mainly unimproved places One assumes they had something of the

feeling of the wooded “grove” that attracted informal recreation and sociable

gatherings (Jackson 1984)

The idea of reserving scenic land from development through public

acqui-sition led to the creation of state and county parks all over the country

To-day every state has a system of public recreational lands, usually in areas with

recreational potential, having one or more elements such as valuable forests,

mountainous or rugged terrain, and attractive surface waters Such parks invite

hiking, cookouts and picnics, swimming, boating, and fi shing; some permit

overnight camping

The state park movement began when California established a state park in

the Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Big Tree Grove in 1866 (later Yosemite

National Park) The state acted in part from a report submitted by Frederick

Law Olmsted, which urged that such magnifi cent scenery be made public to

uplift the health and spirit of the large majority of citizens who would

other-wise not have access to such natural resources (Newton 1971)

Yosemite would remain the only state park in the country until New York

created the Niagara Falls Reservation in 1885 That same year, in an atmosphere

of infl amed public opinion over logging excesses in the Adirondacks, the New

York legislature established the Adirondack Forest Preserve to protect the

re-maining state-owned land in the Adirondack region from being sold off to

log-gers The act provided that lands within the preserve would be “forever kept

as wild forest lands” (Terrie 1994, 92) Although the land — and therefore, it

was believed, the headwaters of the state’s major rivers —would be protected, it

was assumed that the timber would be managed according to scientifi c forestry

principles An 1895 constitutional convention, however, took the then-radical

step of adding a provision that protected the timber in the preserve from being

“sold, removed, or destroyed” (Terrie 1994, 104)

Other early state parks include Lake Itasca State Park, containing the

head-waters of the Mississippi River in Minnesota, in 1891, and the fi rst county park

organization, in Essex County, New Jersey, in 1895 Illinois established the

Starved Rock State Park in 1911; Wisconsin formed a State Park Board in 1907,

and Connecticut founded its State Park Commission in 1912 (Newton 1971) In

general, the impetus for state parks concerned public enjoyment and recreation

rather than averting environmental catastrophe The state park movement took

its biggest strides in the 1920s and 1930s, with a strong impetus from Stephen

Mather, director of the National Park Service By that time the National Park

System already comprised many of its most famous units: Yellowstone,

Yosem-ite, Glacier, Grand Canyon, and Crater Lake, among others The public interest

in touring parks amid the spectacular growth of automobile ownership led to

grave concern about overuse of national parks for recreational purposes It was

hoped that a system of well-distributed state parks would satisfy much of the

desire for recreation and act to buffer the national parks from overuse (Newton

1971; Cutler 1985)

Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx belongs more to this era of public reservations

than to the earlier era of constructed parks Selected for the scenic value of its

shoreline and adjacent islands along Long Island Sound, the park incorporated

the estates of several wealthy families One of these, the Bartow-Pell Mansion,

has been preserved with its gardens and grounds At 2,700 acres, Pelham Bay

Park is the largest unit in the New York City park system

2 6 R E T H I N K I N G U R B A N P A R K S

The park’s most popular attraction is a crescent-shaped saltwater beach with

a promenade and extensive recreational facilities opposite the beach These —

including the beach itself —were constructed by Robert Moses’s Parks

De-partment during the Depression years using federal funds available under the

New Deal The beach and its adjacent facilities occupy an area of landfi ll that

connected the two largest offshore islands to the mainland The park includes

woods and wetland tracts, two golf courses, picnic grounds, and riding stables

Van Cortlandt Park, in the north-central Bronx, has a similar history The

park preserves rocky woodland and river shoreline as well as the building and

grounds of the colonial-period Van Cortlandt estate Within its 1,146 acres, Van

Cortlandt Park offers the nation’s oldest municipal public golf course, nature

trails, athletic fi elds, swimming pool, and athletic stadium Both these Bronx

landscape parks were created in the late nineteenth century out of country

es-tates lying at the far reaches of the territory newly annexed by New York City

from Westchester County The two Bronx parks were part of a comprehensive

city planning effort that mapped streets and parkways in the new borough of

the Bronx in anticipation of widespread population growth In its fi rst 40 years

Pelham Bay Park was shaped as much by vernacular place-making activity by

users as it was by the Parks Department As described in Chapter 6, the park

has a fascinating history of tent colonies and garden-building groups Not until

the WPA years of the mid-1930s did the city government develop the extensive

picnic grounds and athletic and swimming facilities of Orchard Beach

The Recreation Facility ParkThe 1920s and 1930s represented the crest of a third era in municipal parks,

emphasizing recreation facilities, which began at the turn of the century The

recreation facility park recalls the Olmsted park in having been largely

con-structed The atmosphere, however, was entirely different from either the

land-scape park or the public reservation In both landland-scape parks and woodland

reservations, providing users contact with nature had priority over active forms

of recreation The recreation facility park had its roots in the Progressive

move-ment at the turn of the twentieth century The reformers of that era believed

that park planners needed to take an activist stance in bringing the benefi ts

of wholesome recreation to urban people, especially children This goal was

realized in the playground, a facility provided with specialized recreational

spaces and equipment and staffed by play directors Olmsted Sr had designed

an “outdoor gymnasium” in the West End of Boston in 1892, but landscape

architects regard Chicago as the standard bearer in the playground movement

(Newton 1971; Cranz 1982) The Olmsted Brothers’ designs for neighborhood